


A Fire in the Desert

by Cythieus



Category: John Cleaver Series - Dan Wells
Genre: F/M, Fluff, One Shot, Post canon, Spoilers for book 6
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-10
Updated: 2018-05-10
Packaged: 2019-05-04 08:51:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14589423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cythieus/pseuds/Cythieus
Summary: SPOILERS FOR BOOK SIX OF THE JOHN CLEAVER SERIES. John goes to the desert to let off some steam. Brooke meets up with him to help. Mostly in character fluff. One shot.





	A Fire in the Desert

Around this time of day everything in the Arizona desert is different shades of dark blue and purple with streaks of golden yellow and orange where the wisps of thin clouds stretch over the sky. It was late December now. Before long the sky would be completely dark. This time of year it felt like it happened earlier and earlier every day. 

I had to finish my work. When the sun set it was only a matter of time before the cold followed. I’d stripped down to a white shirt and a pair of old jeans to avoid getting dirty as I moved the lumber scraps off of the back of the flatbed. Margo had let me borrow it, though it’s true purpose was moving the lowering device from funerals to and from the mortuary. 

A little wood tied down in the truck bed wouldn’t hurt anything. The wooden pallet prickles at my fingers as I left it up to let it rest on my shoulder, letting my head move to the side to allow more space for me to carry it. When I toss it on the pile of broken bits of lumber and plywood the whole thing shutters and the pallet slides to a rest on the side.

Dust swirls around me as I strafe the wood slinging my accelerant of choice over the fire, kerosene mixed with diesel. It’s dangerous to mix these kinds of things without knowing what you’re doing. Diesel and Styrofoam can cause you to end up with napalm, which burns far too long and hot for my needs here. Some people think they should use gasoline to light a fire, but you only do that if you don’t value your eyebrows and want debris thrown all over. 

I mixed the ingredients back at the mortuary and I planned to empty the contents here. I didn’t have need for it after the fire, after the stress wafted away with the smoke and the cinders. 

White light filled the horizon in front of me with my shadow plastered across the desert and stretching off into the distance. I looked back to see a car with those bright bluish headlights coming slowly away from the road toward me. The desert wasn’t designed for a sedan or coupe and this looked like one of the two. I dropped the jerry can on the ground and it clattered against a rock. The FBI knew where I was and what I was doing, plus they wouldn’t have to bring the wrong kind of vehicle out here to find me. Harris would know where I was or at least how to look for me. And it’s possible that another Withered would too, but there were no more. 

Margo was all that was left. 

The car stopped several feet back just after aiming the most intense part of its headlights away from me. The engine was left running and I heard the door open, but I couldn’t see who was coming. No point in running now anyone who would be looking for me would either easily chase me down or shoot me in the back. 

“John?” John? It’s you!” The voice belonged to a woman and had a sing song quality. It reminded me of someone, but it felt too cheerful and full. Then she stepped in front of the car with a hand pressed to the top of a big floppy hat to hold it in place as her dress flapped in the wind. 

I took a few shuffling steps toward her. “How did you…” 

“John, it’s me Brooke.” 

In the faded light I could just make out the shape of her face and the darker areas on her sun-kissed shoulders. She threw herself into my arms and grabbed hold of my neck and shoulders. Brooke was slightly taller than when I had last seen her and her hair had grown back out. And she had filled out. Our nutrition hadn’t been…top priority when we were hitchhiking on money borrowed from a dead man. Somehow after all this time the Brooke in my head was still the fourteen year old girl next door. 

It’d been two years and we were grown now. Brooke looked like a woman now, though she didn’t feel like a stranger when she held me close. 

“How did you find me?” I ask. I’m suddenly very aware of the smell of accelerant on my clothes and in my hair. 

Brooke steps back as if to look me over again. “Run from Rain,” she says finally. “I knew you would figure it out and once the therapy did…whatever it is it did things were much clearer. Agent Harris—that’s his real name. He tried to keep the truth from me, but I noticed that when he left one time there was this crazy report of a shootout here and then I remembered Fort Bruce and Nobody was just telling me that it was her. It was Rain.”

I keep my distance. “They’re still…in there?” 

Brooke nods. “It’s different than before. They don’t so much as come out as…they are just with me.” She walks around me toward the fire pile examining the wood. “Are we building a fire? Looks like a pretty big one.” 

“It’s dry out here. Not much for it to catch.” 

“It’s also getting cold. Maybe I dressed wrong.”

I move the jerry can away from the fire. “It’ll be warm too. It could help.” In a nearby box is a some old phone books and newspapers. The kind of things good for getting a fire going. 

Brooke jogged up, her shoes sliding to a stop next to the box. “You’re covered in diesel. Probably not safe for you to light it. Can I do the honors?” 

The old me would have been worried that Brooke was going to throw herself into the fire promptly after it was lit. But I don’t sense any of that from her. I fashion some of the papers into a long column and squirt a bit of lighter fluid from a small bottle on the tip. I had the dry end to Brooke along and hold up my lighter. “We do it together.” 

Brooke nods and I strike the Zippo lighter until a beautiful orange flame erupts from the paper. I haven’t heard Brooke laugh in a long time. She charges toward the wood pile with the makeshift torch held up over her head and flings it into the center of everything. 

The desert around us glows a brilliant yellow. The fire crackles deep inside of the wood causing it to sizzle and pop. Brooke is frozen in front of it in awe. I move closer to just look and out of some weird need to be near her. 

On instinct and without looking over at me she grabs my hand and laces her fingers through mine. “It’s beautiful,” she says. 

Brooke had been my first obsession. She had been the girl that I dreamed about in ways that men shouldn’t really dream about women. Violence replaced any urge for the kinds of things that people my age were meant to be watching in videos on a computer with the volume down—it was the first place we really saw sex. By the time that my best friend Max showed me porn in high school it felt uninteresting to me. I had seen dead bodies in the morgue and I had no connection to these people. They were just corpses linking up this way and that. 

Something had changed though. I smelled Brooke through the stringent scent of burning diesel. There was body wash and a hint of clean sweat. Her jerks away from mine and she runs back to the flat bed truck to climb onto it to sit. “Come on, John!” 

I walk over and hoist myself up in almost this pushup press way. Margo and Jasmyn had taught me other ways to blow off steam. Fires weren’t the only thing to do. I worked out, I boxed at a little local gym. The kind of place that is built in some old feed store that the town has no use for anymore and where you lift giant ropes and all that. 

Apparently Brooke notices. She cups a hand around my bicep as I sit down. “Damn, John. What happened here?” She asks. 

I don’t pull away. “Just something to occupy my time.” 

Brooke pushes a loose group of hairs back over her ear. “I’m just playing with you. Though I want to know about what you’re doing now?” 

“Well, since you’re here I guess you stopped by the mortuary. I’m just doing that and…taking online classes. Harris set me up with a degree and the government actually provided a scholarship.” 

“The last time I saw him it seemed like he thought you could be him one day. Like, you could be a profiler.”

That was something Harris never said to me. I hadn’t thought of it. “What have you been doing?” I wait to ask Brooke this, but there’s nothing that I can think to say about her new Harris fact.

“I do therapy and I was working for this crisis victim place in Houston. They dealt with mostly domestic abuse and rape cases. It feels fulfilling. I think because there’s like a thousand women inside of me and a lot of them have been through some…pretty shitty stuff.” Brooke draws invisible circles in the bed of the truck between us with her index finger, averting her gaze from mine. 

“Wow, that sounds…important.” 

“Taking care of the dead is important. No one respects the dead more than you, John. No one is more suited for this than you.” She smiles. “You’re doing well here it seems, I met the girl back there. Jasmyn. She seems sweet and she was very interested in who I was. The people in this town are real nice. It kind of reminds me of home…before all the stuff started.” 

I nod. “Margaret and my Aunt talked about moving down here. They come to see me once a month. And the town is mostly good. It’s peaceful—I think it’ll stay that way too.” 

“What about friends?” Asks Brooke. “Have you made any friends? Are you really close to anyone?” Her eyes can’t seem to meet mine. 

“Other than Jasmyn and Margo—there’s some people from the community college. They’re okay. I am better with people now, but I still need my alone time.” 

Brooke shakes her head laughing. “The others are just telling me to go for it. You were always so dense, John.” Brooke’s face is right in mine, her eyes lined up with mine and I can taste her breath. “Are you seeing anyone?” 

“No.”

Brooke pushes her lips to mine before I can even close my mouth. Her hands tighten around shirt and she’s holding me to her. I’m frozen as she continues to kiss me. It feels good, but I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to do this. She pulls away, one hand playing in my hair. “Don’t be scared or worried. It’s okay, it’s just me now. It’s Brooke. It’s all Brooke.” She pressed her cheek to mine. 

I knew enough now to not ask about Marci. She was still there. Nobody was there and the other women. The others were telling her to go for it. It was them. Had Nobody wanted this? Had Marci? 

“It’s good to see you.”

Brooke laughs. “It’s good to see you too.” She kisses me again. “If I come on too strong just tell me, okay?” 

“Okay.”

Brooke puts her hand in my lap and I don’t stop her. “I just think that given the nature of our time together…” her hand ghosts up to the hem of my shirt and she lifts it away up. “…that there’s some sense of urgency…” her hand slides into my pants and I just watch. She uses her other hand to lift my hand up to her face. “…if you’re game, I’m game.” 

Brooke’s hand was warm and I could feel myself swelling inside of my pants and underwear, bent against the fabric that felt rough suddenly. Her hand is soft and warm and slightly slick. She works her fingers up and down my shaft while locking eyes with me. 

“Is this okay?” Her voice sounds distant somehow. 

“Yeah. Yeah it’s good.” My breath catches in my throat cutting my sentence off prematurely. 

Speaking of the word prematurely…

“When I was done with all the therapy and the medication worked,” Brooke says as she still works her hand back and forth beneath my pants. “I had so many—memories. I can remember how to field strip a rifle. And I make a banging soufflé—they’re fluffy and everything. I remember how to skin a tiger so that you keep all the fur in one piece—haven’t gotten to put these to use yet.” She smiles before kissing me. Her hand motion slows. 

“And that’s the thing. I know a lot about a lot of things. Is it okay if I show you something?” 

It’s like everything is hazy. I can’t feel where I begin and Brooke ends. I feel warm, but not the kind of warm that the nearby fire would cause. The light ebbs with the motion of the flame and the wind changes direction so the smoke isn’t coming this way. 

“Yeah. You can show me.” I’m resting some of my weight against Brooke now, my stomach feels tight and I don’t know what will happen if she goes on too much longer. 

And she stops. 

“Lay down, please.” 

I’m slow to move, my elbows feel wobbly as I push off to scoot up onto the bed of the truck more and lower myself onto my back. Brooke stands up on the truck and stares out across the desert. The lights from her car are still on, but I she isn’t worried about that. She’s looking for something else. I see her silhouette against the dancing pattern of the flames as she hikes her skirt up around her hips to work her underwear down. 

Her form is weirdly perfect. I haven’t ever seen Brooke in this light. I treated her fragile. I protected her, but did she really need all of that? She tossed the underwear onto the truck bed. “Don’t let me forget those, okay?” 

Taking the hint I worked my pants down, though I didn’t have the nerve to do more. Brooke straddles me and presses her body down against me and kisses me, deeper this time. She spoke in a hurried fashion. “I’m nervous and not at the same time. This is, like, the millionth time I’ve done this and the first…” 

“First for me,” I manage. 

“And this is a thing now. If you leave me I might just kill you.” Brooke said with a laugh. 

It’s an awkward Brooke joke with her patented nervous laugh. She wraps her hand around me now, working her hand up and down my shaft again with her body still pressed to mine. She lifts her hips and slides down over me. 

Inside it’s slick and warm and tight. Brooke sits up, her knees still at my sides. She pumps against me and I let out a sharp breath and my hand goes to her leg. I’m under her skirt with my fingers resting on her thigh. When my other hand touches her waist she grabs it and moves it down between her legs, pushing my fingers against her. 

“John…” 

Hearing my name escape her lips that way changes something in me. I push up so that I’m almost sitting, my fingers are still just inside of her and she’s moaning. 

The fire roars and bursts into a renewed brightness as one of the pieces of limber snaps and the wood falls down causing a shower of sparks. Orange flurries move through the air over Brooke’s shoulder. 

Brooke slides the strap of her sundress down. “You can be rougher…” Brooke says laughing. “If you need to.” Her bare chest is against mine now, her blonde hair is in my face and she pushes her shoulder against my mouth. “Bite me.” 

I don’t usually eat meat. I guess this isn’t eating. Carefully, I oblige. My teeth just pinch at her skin lightly before I move to suck on her neck. Her movements become more aggressive and the truck is bouncing with us, moving slightly on the shocks. Everything goes warm and my body shudders as I climax. Brooke kisses me. “I love you,” she says. “I never stopped.”

Brooke is still crazy. That’s the only explanation. She’s doesn’t seem to be suicidal or as bad as she was, but she’s not okay.

I’m not okay. I’ve never been normal and in the afterglow of sex as the night air cools the sweat on my body despite the flames nearby, I could see that this was okay. The two of us together was good. Brooke wasn’t afraid of me and she knew what I was thinking. Not in the creepy way that Agent Harris did, but in an intimate way. 

Brooke puts her lips on mine. “I don’t suppose you would last this long with me looking like this and a fire nearby.” There’s something about her green eyes and the front teeth that are just a bit too big that’s gorgeous to me. 

“Sorry,” I say. “It was pretty sudden.” 

“It’ll get better,” Brooke says. “We can try again later. If you don’t mind me staying.” 

“Of course not. Boy Dog missed you, though. And we’ll have to talk to Rain.” 

Brooke is still straddling me and she freezes. “Rain?” 


End file.
